GameStop’s Ryan Cohen, a Stapler, & Billionaire Ken Langone 7/15/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. The meme king. Ryan Cohen, GameStop CEO, has legendary status among social media-fueled retail traders. You can post an emoji of something and people go crazy. We have a loyal shareholder base, clearly. He joins us in a rare interview on his reinvention of the once left for dead video game retailer. We're a much more profitable business, smaller business, less stores, very strong balance sheet. And Ken Langone, one of the founders of Home Depot, the philanthropist behind NYU Langone, and a major donor to Andrew Cuomo in his bid for New York City mayor.

0:48He's the right ticket now. He didn't do himself justice by his mindset in the primary. He should have worked his ass off and he didn't. Plus, NVIDIA to sell chips in China. And Starbucks office workers, time to get back to your desks. It's 2025. Why weren't they at five days a week in 2023? Why? It's Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back to bye in 3, 2, 1, cue it please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live at the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. The big story of the morning, semiconductor NVIDIA planning to resume sales of a key AI chip to China.

1:36The company is saying it's filing applications with the U.S. government to restart sales of its H20 graphics processing unit and expects to get the licenses soon. NVIDIA has been saying that it introduced a new model designed to meet Chinese tech regulations. Now, Chinese tech stocks popping on the back of this news. The developments coming days after NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Wang meeting with President Trump back in April. You might remember the White House imposed export restrictions that stopped NVIDIA from selling the H20 to China. The move at the time prompted the company to write off$5.5 billion in inventories.

2:13Wang is currently on his second visit to China in about three months. is now expected to hold a media briefing tomorrow. But, of course, this raises just about a million questions because the first one starts with what happened between April and now. If these chips really were a national security threat to us, why should we be giving them over now? Nobody knows. Is it part of a larger trade negotiation truce with rare metals and other things? and we need the metals, they need the chips. Or TikTok. Or TikTok, or tariffs. We're all trying to find our way into what the right balance is between helping AI advance and not having China lead the world.

3:00That's the question. And by the way, if you let NVIDIA do this, maybe that then hurts like a Huawei temporarily or something like that. Huawei is the big loser. There's so many sort of push-pulls here. Yeah, there are. And I don't know, and I'm not willing to immediately say, wow, you know, Jensen's friends with Trump and this is a car valve and whatever. Because I don't know what the right... There's a huge view that's been not only put forth by Jensen, but about a lot of other people in the industry, that if America wants to be the leaders, you have to be able to be able to sell around the world, that Huawei stepped in to fill that void.

3:36Look, there's the argument that this is great for America in terms of leading AI, But there's also the argument that if it was so great for America, China wouldn't want to let them do this unless they actually thought our chips were that much better. Right. So the question, our chips are that much better. And so they wouldn't have access to the chips otherwise. And Huawei chips are not as good yet. But the great mother of invention is forcing Huawei. But you can't continue to be the world leader if you can't sell everywhere. Well, except into China. I mean, if you think one day that Huawei would create chips that are that great.

4:09And by the way, these are different chips. The H20 was originally created to try and make sure that it was not going to be able to do some of the terrible things militarily that others had pointed to. So that's the question, too. The only thing that I don't understand about this is we've had so many people come on our air repeatedly and say, China's a national security threat to our country. These chips present a security threat. If we let them actually move ahead and be able to dominate or even get close to us in AI, And I think deep seek, if everybody remembers that moment earlier this year, frankly, at the end of January.

4:43It was February, I think. End of January, beginning of February. It was January because it happened during Davos. We're obviously not going to stop all trade with China because they're a security threat. So then somewhere in between is some type of trade relationship we have with China. I'm not going on the friend of Trump thing either. I'm just saying what is the balance? Who knows? I don't know. What is the balance? Probably shouldn't have any. Kyle Bass and others would probably say don't have any relationship. Others like. Again, brings you back to TikTok. Your buddy Paul Tudor. No. Who's the one that just loves China?

5:14One of those guys. Ray Dalio. You know, he's open. Give them everything they've ever asked for just to make a few more dollars. And the real question I want to know is what are we going to get for this? Right. And I think if you're talking security threats, it brings you back to TikTok. Five trillion for a million. on and we are now months into extensions of saying okay we're going to continue to try and do a deal with them but there have been people for years in congress who have said that tick tock is a threat to national security because of the influence that it has especially on younger people here a five trillion dollar market cap and a continued rally in the nasdaq it's not five trillion yeah it's right it's for that no and that's what do we get for it and i said that's what we get maybe we get A$5 trillion market cap and a NASDAQ that continues to climb.

5:58I think Becky's point about TikTok is the right one, ultimately, because we have a law even in place. I mean, we have actually, Congress voted. No one wanted to close TikTok down, right? Apparently, all of Congress who represents us, legally, they did. Well, they didn't want Chinese ownership. They wanted it to be sold. So they didn't want it to continue under Chinese ownership. The question is, do you get a sale of that? Is there some detente or truce? And is this a sign of a broader thawing of the trade relations between the two countries at this point, too? China's here to stay. They are going to take over the world.

6:35And we're helpless to stop them, but we've got to trade with them. That's your position? Yes. As expected, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo now launching an independent bid for mayor, They're setting up a rematch with the frontrunner, Zoran Mondami, the Democratic nominee. We're going to get into that race and everything else. So many topics with the one and only Ken Langone, Home Depot's co-founder and somebody who, as we always say, never holds back. We're going to have him on the broadcast.

7:08Starbucks is going to start to require corporate employees to return to the office four days per week. That's going to start in October. Joe is going to get his Kleenex. I'm going on a picket line. In a letter to employees, company CEO Brian Nichols saying workers who prefer to leave the company instead of heading back to the office for an additional day would be offered a one-time voluntary exit program with a cash payment. I don't know if you get free coffee with that. And don't let the door hit you. He wrote the following. He said, quote, we understand that not everyone will agree with this approach.

7:41We've listened and thought carefully. But as a company built on human connection and given the scale, the turnaround ahead, we believe this is the right path for Starbucks. Back in October, you might remember Starbucks telling workers they were at risk of being fired if they didn't return to the office three days per week. And, of course, the sympathy is here on a set where we come five days a week. It's 2025. It's 2025, Andrew. It's 2025. Actually, Starbucks is doing this the nice way by saying you can get this one-time offer where you get a cash payout. because all these other companies are doing it and saying, hey, you either have to come in or you have to quit and you're not going to pay out.

8:16So Starbucks is actually doing this the nicer way by saying you can get a cash payout. There was just an article last week. I forget where it was talking about how some companies are doing this as a way to bring in layoffs and not actually have to pay any severance payments. Andrew Cuomo was governor, had a thing every day talking about COVID. He had to resign. COVID ended. Now he's back running. All these things have happened since we had the pandemic. You knew this would eventually happen. It's 2025. Why weren't they at five days a week in 2023? Why? Their workforce has moved all over the place.

8:49And by the way, Brian Nichol lives in California. Right. That's also the complicated part. He lives in Newport Beach. I know where he lives. When you're flying to work, how does that work? I know. It's not a, you know what? The world's not fair. Just not. It's never going to be, Andrew. Tees will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, one of the leaders of the meme stock movement. Remember the GameStop short squeeze? Co-founder of Chewy turned social media stock trading sensation during the pandemic, turned CEO of GameStop, Ryan Cohen, joins us with yet another offbeat market. This time, it's for a stapler and something less safe for work.

9:29I'd originally said six figures. I'm going to throw in my underwear. Your dirty underwear? Yeah, do you believe the underwear is going to advance the price?

9:44Welcome back to Squawk Pod. I'm producer Katie Kramer. Remember meme stocks when Robin Hood, Redditors and a roaring kitty all walked into a video game store and turned stock market conventional wisdom upside down? The revolution in trading during the long pandemic winter of 2020 and 2021. saw nostalgic brands popular in turn of the millennium malls, like GameStop and AMC Theaters, become absolute winners. Fueled by internet personalities and message boards, millions of regular investors bought shares in the fading brick-and-mortar retailer GameStop, driving the company's share price from under$3 to nearly$500 in weeks, a 1 ,500 % rally.

10:31The collective power of so-called little guys caused hedge funds that had shorted GameStop to lose billions.

10:42One of the mysterious leaders of this movement was Ryan Cohen, 30-something investor, best known as co-founder of pet supply company Chewy. He was GameStop's biggest individual shareholder by the end of 2020. and his mercurial, almost coded language, social media presence became a guiding force for a new generation of meme-savvy, irreverent stock buyers. There's a lot of GIFs and poop emojis, some considerable bathroom humor. Heat tweets melting ice cream cones and an army of Redditors interpret what that means for McDonald's business strategy. At the height of the meme craze, Cohen became a board member at GameStop, then chairman, and in 2023, CEO, all while amassing considerable stakes in other brands like meme stock Bed Bath & Beyond, Apple, and about a billion dollars of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

11:30But he is working to reinvent GameStop as the industry becomes increasingly digital. No need to wait in line at the mall when the newest game release is just a click away. The retailer is investing heavily in Bitcoin and pivoting to the booming collectibles market. And here's how we got to Cohen's appearance on our TV broadcast today. He rarely does press and hasn't been on CNBC formally since the Chewy IPO in 2019. But Cohen is using his internet celebrity for his company, auctioning off an infamous stapler that damaged a Nintendo Switch at a GameStop store last month. Staplegate meets the Meme King, and we're off.

12:07Andrew Ross Sorkin takes things from here. This morning, we are talking to GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, who's a little bit behind some of this. Ryan, great to see you. It's been a while. I have about a million questions about what's going on with GameStop and your investments and everything else, but let's start with the stapler. It's up to, what,$250 ,000 right now? Yes. So we had our store in Staten Island on launch day, and the store manager took the stapler and stapled it into the switch. So we damaged the Switch, we refurbished it, and now we're auctioning off the stapler, the Switch, and basically it turned it into a collectible.

12:58So it's right now$250 ,000. I'd originally said six figures. I'm going to throw in my underwear. We've surpassed that, obviously. And now seven figures. If we get the seven figures, I'll personally deliver the underwear in Miami and we'll take a trip to McDonald's together. Your dirty underwear? Yeah. Do you believe the underwear is going to advance the price? And are you going to sign the underwear? I will sign the underwear whether we'll advance the price or not I'm not sure, we'll see and just so we're clear is this, you said a trip to is it a trip to Miami or they got to pick it up in Miami where you live I will fly them to Miami and McDonald's is on me and McDonald's, how much stuff can they get at McDonald's?

13:48whatever they want I could order a lot at McDonald's I don't know if I could get up to the price though But before we even go farther, who do you think is bidding on this? I don't know. Are you, though, fascinated by this sort of fascination with GameStop and with you? I mean, the fact that people would want your underwear? I don't do a lot of interviews where I ask about the underwear, Ryan. It's a nice underwear. What kind? No, no, no, no. Okay. Let's move on. Only the winner is going to find out. Only the winner is going to find out. Ryan, let's talk about where GameStop sits right now in terms of just where you are on the journey.

14:36And, I mean, I remember talking to you a million years ago, obviously, during the GameStop frenzy. But where are you from then to now? We're a much more profitable business, smaller business, less stores, very strong balance sheet. We've gotten our costs under control, and we've changed the business from a reliance on hardware and software to a significant focus on trading cards. and collectibles generally. And how do you think about crypto in the middle of all that? We made an investment of just over$500 million into Bitcoin. And I look at it as a hedge against inflation and global money printing.

15:37And we'll see what happens. So. But how much should people who are investing in GameStop think of you as some kind of like portfolio of assets and maybe even like a mini micro strategy or something? No, I mean, we have our own unique strategy, and we have a very strong balance sheet, over$9 billion of cash and marketable securities. and we will deploy that capital responsibly as I would my own capital and only look for opportunities where the downside is limited and there's a lot of upside. So we'll be opportunistic when we see those opportunities. I'm curious what you think of your shareholder base these days.

16:30Again, because I think so many people think about the shareholders during what was this GameStop frenzy, and just your ability to take to X or social media and get people, as I said, excited about what you're doing and how you think about that. It's very unusual. Well, it's just unusual. I mean, you and maybe Elon Musk, and I don't know if I should put you in the same category, but have sort of a very special ability to have this sort of fan following that's sort of very unusual. You can post an emoji of something and people go crazy. We have a loyal shareholder base, clearly. I don't think there's many situations of public companies where the CEO receives absolutely no compensation.

17:22I mean, you can never be completely aligned with common shareholders because everyone has a different cost basis and has a different time horizon. But I don't get compensated. I've invested my own personal capital. I don't have any perverse incentives. And the goal is to maximize shareholder value. So, you know, you see these public companies where you've got executives and they're collecting tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars in risk-free compensation. And frankly, it's despicable. And so that's not the way that I run GameStop. I actually have a broader question about investors since I think you have an unusual relation with them.

18:10We've been talking on the broadcast for the past couple of weeks about this push towards folks who are tokenizing effectively private companies, shares in private companies to what might be described as unaccredited investors, the people who have less than a million dollars. There's a big argument being made that we need to democratize investing, that the real opportunities are in private investments, and that these sort of derivative instruments are a great opportunity. There's other people who say this is crazy and we have regulations for a reason. And for some reason, they're not being applied or at least listened to in this context.

18:49What do you think about all of that? I don't have much of an opinion on it. I haven't looked into it. The reason I ask is more just about sort of the opportunity set for traders. today and sort of the opportunity to make money in these in these unusual I don't know if they're unusual, but different ways. And this idea of democratizing investing, which I think a lot of people look to what you've done and think that that this is about democratizing opportunity. I think that there is a lot of risk in investing, period, especially in individual securities. And And I don't give out investing advice.

19:35And I've always said the best thing to do for most people is to invest in low-cost ETFs. And you can lose a lot of money investing. And you have to have the right temperament for it. So it's for the very few. But in terms of people being able to invest in whatever the hell they want, people should be allowed to invest whatever the hell they want. and they take on those risks. And so, I mean, that's generally my point of view, but understand that it comes with significant risk and volatility and you got to have the right temperament and do your own diligence. Are you still a passive investor in Apple and Netflix and I think Wells Fargo at one point?

20:20Yeah. And what's your take on? In Apple and in Wells Fargo. So in terms of Apple, Obviously, there's been a lot of questions about Apple and AI and where they sit in terms of the stack relative to so many other players. Do you look at that as a value play at this point? Do you think it's oversold? What's your take? I think it's the strongest brand in the world. You know, you look around you, everyone is glued to their iPhones and people aren't switching devices. They can do a much better job in artificial intelligence. There's no question. series, the same thing that it was 10 or 15 years ago.

21:01And there's definitely an opportunity for them to improve in AI, but they own the ecosystem and they've got a very strong, enviable business. Do you think they need to be super strong in AI or that can just be a layer from somebody else on top? Only if they can make money. You mean only if they can make money from the hardware part? Or are you saying only if they can make money from folks who are paying them to be the layer on top? Yeah, it's not clear who the winners in AI is going to be ultimately. You know, you look today, ChatGPT is clearly number one. But we'll see if they can ultimately develop a real mode in AI.

21:46Or ultimately, once, you know, everyone's models are at the same level, how much pricing model there will be between the different languages and the different models is is tbd so um i think everyone's trying to figure out long term how do you monetize ai there's no question ai is incredibly disruptive but who the long-term winners are going to be is uh i i don't have a point of view at this point on uh on who's going to be able to ultimately create a durable competitive advantage in the space. You do have a lot of money in Alibaba. So I imagine you think that they have a credible claim in the AI world?

22:34We're supposed to be talking about GameStop. I'm just curious where you land. Well, let me ask you in terms of trading cards, maybe it maybe goes to crypto and trading cards. Do you think that crypto and trading cards ever go together in some kind of digital way that we don't know about? It could. in what way? Give me a little more. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But, you know, we've there's opportunities. Can you tell us about those opportunities in terms of just how to think about it for the investors or even the customers of GameStop right now? Like what to expect? There's an opportunity to buy trading cards and to do so using cryptocurrency.

23:20So we'll see how much there is on the actual demand side for that kind of product. But there's definitely an opportunity to actually use crypto in the space. And the utility of crypto beyond investing is a hedge against inflation. I think that so far, that's been the biggest demand for crypto. And so the ability to actually use crypto within transactions is something that is an opportunity. And, you know, we've it's something that we're looking at. Is that stable coins? Is that Ethereum? Or are you thinking people are going to actually use Bitcoin to pay for things? I mean, we're going to look at all cryptocurrencies.

24:08OK, Ryan, we're going to leave it there. We appreciate it. We wish you lots of luck today with this big auction. We hope that you make a lot of money for charity. And if somebody wants the stapler and the underwear and McDonald's, you can go out and get it this morning. Are you going to place a bed? Well, you might have priced me out already because we're at 250. It might be going up as we're talking. So, you know, if it had been at 250, I think that would have been a steal. 249, 700. It's not too late. You've got about a day left. I got a day left. I may do like a GoFundMe page to see if I can maybe crowdsource some money to put together for our trip to McDonald's.

24:51Thank you. All right. Appreciate it. Next on Squawk Pod, investor Ken Langone does not mince words. He joins us for an extended discussion on the markets, the Fed, politics, and his remarkable run. You're one of the founders of Home Depot, and it's one of the few companies that has been founded and in your lifetime turned into a Dow component. I know. It's pretty remarkable. That's 30 years ago we went into Dow. We went into Dow in 1990. It's a hell of a feat.

25:24You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC with Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here's Becky. All right. We have a big special guest on set with us for an extended conversation this morning. We are very happy that Ken Langone is here. Of course, he's the Home Depot co-founder. He's currently chairman and president of Invermed Associates. Ken, it's been far too long. We have missed you. We've been looking forward to what you have to say this morning. I thought you were doing what they do with the Indians, taking them out to a tree and say, die there. No, we've missed you. And we've been working a long time to try and get a date worked out.

26:00You see, we're all here. I know. You're survivors. I'm impressed. Andrew's here today. And you haven't killed each other yet. Remember, sometimes Andrew would not be here. just by coincidence. I think there's hope for Andrew. I've noticed that too. I had a nice chat with him last week. And I honest to God think he's moving to see the light. He's all this good news. Look at the alternative. Look at what the other side has become. I mean, come on. He's naive, but he's not dumb. He sees what reality is. Naive, not dumb. I'm going to put that on my... Take it. Take it. On my tombstone. Naive, but not dumb.

26:36Gordon, you're certainly not dumb. I still want to know my epitaph. I wish I had you agree on that. That's really old, right? Really old age. Yeah, that's what Warren always says. Kim, why don't we just talk about how you're feeling right now, what you see in the economy, what you see happening in the markets, what you think about the country? Because it's been so long since we've gotten to check in with you. If I told you how bullish I was, you wouldn't believe it. I have never been more excited about the future of America than I am right now. Why? For a lot of reasons. Number one, like it or not, this guy's getting things done.